Wall Street Journal editorial: “Moniz breaks the taboo against selling US crude overseas”

“The happy paradox of U.S. energy markets is that the domestic fossil-fuels boom has been overwhelming destructive federal government policy,” begins a 16 December Wall Street Journal editorial . Though no one thinks of that newspaper as an Obama administration energy-policy ally, the second sentence proposes that the “latest example of emerging common sense is Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz’s suggestion last week that the U.S. may need to reconsider its 40-year ban on most oil exports.”

Thanks to private investment and ingenuity, the editors say, the American “energy renaissance” has caused the International Energy Agency to estimate that the US will become the world’s largest oil producer within two years. However, they explain, the export restrictions, born in the antiquated energy politics of the 1970s, too often hold back exporters by forcing them to endure “ad hoc bureaucratic review.”

The editors argue that oil exports “would help with the U.S. trade balance, but far more important is that they would allow energy markets to operate more efficiently.” US-produced crude oil is lighter and of higher quality than the imported stuff that US refiners usually deal with. This means that US “drillers have a more restricted market for their high-quality crude and less incentive to expand production.”

The editorial denies that easing the restrictions would cause gas prices to rise or interfere with achieving national energy independence. It charges, moreover, that on the environmental left, some opponents of easing “want to stop the U.S. oil boom so world prices rise and renewable energy can replace fossil fuels.”

Lifting the ban, the editors predict, would boost production, create jobs, and protect living standards.

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teven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.